So, it's still true, even in 2012 that most Americans get their news from the television news. Even in this internet era those future citizens, those future voters, that we're teaching in a high school context, are gonna be getting their news, for the time being at least, from the television news and so it's really important for them as voters that they understand what it is that they're getting in the news, how it's made, what different ways can political topics that are important to them as citizens be portrayed for them. How is the news constructed? So, for them to be able to do the research themselves, to look at some topic that they're interested in and see the different ways that it gets covered is something that I think is really powerful.
Ordinary people can use this tool. People are increasingly involved as publishers themselves. They Tweet, they post to Facebook, they write blogs. If they can use this tool to access the content that they want to comment on, that they want to criticize, and incorporate it into the various social platforms that they're already using, it's going to enrich the sort of commentary that they're able to produce.
This actually moves video from being something that's completely passive to something that people can actually engage with and share and be a part of. So it will actually make people—it will help people engage with video content in a way that they never have before and it's never been possible before with TV only news.
On YouTube it doesn't say where it came from, doesn't say the station, might be someone that just wrote—maybe even misspelled his name. So it's very hard to figure out—where did this come from? Did someone make this? Is this from a station? You can sometimes look for the logo but it's very hard to know, is this from 2008 or 2012? On YouTube very hard to know. Internet Archive tells you exactly: station, day, time, this is when it was said. ... giving people access to, "Where did this come from?" and, "What's the original space?" is really important.
News organizations have to make gut decisions about how they approach coverage of something, whether or not they cover something, and a lot of that is based on memory and that memory can be faulty and s so exciting to have the opportunity that we can actually do a key word search and How many times did we talk about this issue in the last year? ... Obviously it's a huge opportunity to have access more -- anytime there's more information it's better for the democratic process.
